"What if" indeed, those possibilities could branch the game off into multiple directions with very different endings making players go back and rethink what they could have done differently to achieve those other outcomes. That's the kind of thing that gets people to reply games, true diversity instead of just a few different pieces of dialogue and a character swap or extra little animation.

It wouldn't have mattered if ME3 came on 10 discs, I would've paid for the extra discs happily if it meant I could play a game with such open possibilities... it is an absurd thing to ask for, but at the same time, BioWare started this ambitious trek and went soft at the end instead of getting even more ambitious and going that extra mile or kilometre or parsec or whatever